MY PRIVATE SKY

by Kamilla Jørgensen

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One winter, not so long ago, I became bedridden for a month due to illness, and didn’t leave the house for a month. As it related to an operation on my foot, I was left with enough strength to cast myself over something that I, like so many others, enjoy the most, namely, reading. I was lovingly cared for by those close to me; confined to bed in a bright and pleasant room, surrounded by stacks of books. After a short while though, I began to feel despondent. At first I put it down to a yearning after the morphine I had been prescribed at the beginning of my convalescence, and which I had now finished taking, but then I came across a text by a French theorist, who compared the text as mass with the sky; at once flat and featureless, deep, without edges or landmarks,  an imaginary rectangle glimpsed through the window, where the reader according to certain principles could consult birds’ flight, trace reading territories throughout the text, observe the migration of meaning, the daily occurrences of codes, the passage of quotations. And I was suddenly gripped by a desire to simply lie on a sun bed in the garden, on a summer day, and follow the sentence of an aeroplane, written in the sky. Only the book of the skies was of interest to me. A sphere has a solid angle of 4 π. When standing in a flat field then the sky above you describes a solid angle of 2 π and the earth beneath you a corresponding 2 π. In other words, fifty percent of our outdoor world consists of sky. Naturally it affects the psyche when you have no direct access to the sky. To compensate for this I began to study the private images in my digital photo library, cutting out sections of sky and combining them in varied colour gradients. I tried to devise a conceptual order of categorisation, a piece of sky for every month of my life perhaps, but failed dismally, as I am a habitually disengaged photographer, and my library is full of empty shelves. This publication is a chaotic documentation of the sky over my head through the last twenty years, culled from as far back as my digital library allows. I have excluded clouds, birds, flagpoles and other objects, and concentrated on colour. As my knowledge of colour theory is sketchy at best, I have created a colour fan deck, based on intuition. A Danish poet philosophises in an essay about a book that contains everything; where word and phenomenon have fused together, describing the entire world, so that it can be read like that map of the world, first recounted by an Argentinean writer, which in its level of detail, eventually became so large that it ended covering the lands it was supposed to reveal. I like to imagine the heavens as that book; enveloping the same area they describe, simultaneously, while life is lived on earth.  

My Private Sky is published in connection with the group exhibition Skywards, at the exhibition space teksas, together with the outdoor sculpture Sky Fan of mirrors (2 x 1,5m).  

Translated by Phillip Shiels